Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery

Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, often translates into lost opportunities and increased costs-which for many enterprises today, is unacceptable. Having an effective recovery strategy and a set of coherent disaster recovery plans is essential to helping avoid downtime during a crisis. The need for enhanced quality, efficiency, and predictability for disaster recovery and business continuity has increased significantly, highlighting the necessity of a well-defined set of recovery plans and regular testing.

Traditional Disaster Recovery and Virtualization

Traditional disaster recovery plans generally involve maintaining identical, one-to-one hardware and OS configurations at a secondary site that can enable operations to quickly resume when the primary site is unavailable. This approach, however, requires investments in servers and other hardware that then sit idle at the recovery site for much of the time. Using hardware that is similar but not identical, meanwhile, creates challenges related to shifting workloads to a different hardware configuration-because of restrictions in putting applications together under one OS, expensive data synchronization, and infrastructure dependencies-that can lead to complex and overly expensive recovery site investments. Given the highly distributed nature of traditional IT, often because of server sprawl and lack of a shared storage environment, it can be difficult or impossible to discover and remediate missing components using a manual approach.

10 Best Practices for Disaster Recovery Planning

Adhering to best practices can be critical to the success of a disaster recovery implementation.
The following are 10 of the most important considerations identified by Dell when planning such
a deployment:

Articulate the need in financial terms.

Use hard data to create a risk profile.

Identify the critical resources.

Think beyond the data center.

Eliminate or mitigate single points of failure.

Assume that everything is going to fail.

Consider a virtualization data center strategy.

Recognize potential vendor weaknesses.

Keep disaster recovery capabilities up-to-date.

Perform tests on a regular basis

Expert Guidance from Microtime Computers

Microtime Computers can help organizations identify, design, and implement comprehensive virtualization solutions for their environments at a number of levels.

■ Site Visits-Education: Site visits can help organizations understand the potential of virtualization technology, including how it can help meet current and future requirements. Disaster recovery planning workshops can assist with determining the best strategy based on the level of disaster recovery capability needed.
■ Assessments: Assessments are designed to help organizations make informed decisions to help maximize the advantages of virtualization in specific environments. The assessment enables Microtime to identify the scope of relevant solutions and make deployment recommendations. Using automated processes, Microtime gathers up-to-the-minute information about the server environment, including key data on system inventory and up to one business cycle of performance data. Microtime can then analyze the data, assess the situation, and outline options available in the existing infrastructure.
■ Design: Design services can provide a comprehensive, detailed server consolidation architecture and implementation plan based on field experience, and can help organizations understand how the solution can be implemented successfully with minimal end-user disruption.
■ Implementation: Microtime can implement the virtualization solution — both hardware and software — to help organizations quickly realize the advantages of virtualization in their environment.

Simplified Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery

As requirements for avoiding downtime become increasingly stringent, administrators need tools and platforms that can help them plan, design, and implement disaster recovery strategies that can meet those needs. Implementing a high availability architecture based on Microtime server and storage clusters—and taking advantage of the expert guidance available from Microtime Consulting Services—can provide a comprehensive solution for a simplified, cost-effective disaster recovery plan for your business.